Word Facts

'Business' is spelt nothing like it sounds in a manner that is strange even by English standards. It is for that reason that unlike other adjectives ending in Y that take the '-ness' suffix like 'happiness' or 'craziness' for which the terminal Y gets rewritten as an I, 'busyness' keeps its Y from 'busy' as a way to disambiguate itself from 'business'. If to you it feels like 'busyness' should also be written as 'business', know that it was for a very long time. In Old English the word was 'bisignis', or what would today just be 'busy' and '-ness', though the need for the suffix to make it into a noun in this case is rather odd as there was already the Old English noun 'bisig'. The original sense of this 'business' in Old English was 'anxiety' and '(state of being) busy' which was kept in Middle English and Early Modern English, but eventually the senses of be...

The verb, to espouse, something means to support a belief, while the noun, spouse, is a married partner to someone. If today, one wanted to express that noun as a verb, there are plenty of ways to say that, including, 'wed' or 'engaged' or others depending on the situation, so there isn't much need for a new way to express this, but historically, 'espouse' was synonymous with 'marry'. That word originated as a participle from the Latin verb 'spondere' meaning 'betroth', and even when 'espouse' meant 'wed', it tended be be found as 'be espoused to', just like it would have been translated from Latin. Though of the pair, only 'spouse' kept its association with marriage , 'wed' has gained the sense of being attached to an idea separate from marriage, similar to 'espouse'.

Last week on Word Facts you might have learned that ' glob ' comes from a combination of 'blob' and 'gob', though this is not where the story ends. 'Blob', which was generally synonymous with 'bubble' and has quite a similar form to many other words that denote droplets of water or another liquid, including 'blotch' 'and 'botch', whose origins are unknown, and 'plop' which is imitative, as well as 'blot' from Old Norse. Many of these words, just like 'glob' itself are blends of other words; 'blotch' is thought to be at least partially a blend of 'blot' and 'botch'. All of these seem to follow the pattern of bubbles of liquid, which is reasonable for this list, so it may be surprising that 'blubber' denoting fat, not water, would be on this list as well. As it happens however, 'blubber' initially denoted sea-foam and other bubbles on the water, and not just animal ...

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for 'nose' is thought to have been ' snu ' which led to the derivation of many other words relating to noses such as 'snout', 'snot', and more nouns, It also led to the creation of certain verbs we have today like 'sneeze'. 'Snivel', which is more often found as the adjective 'sniveling', comes from the Old English 'snyflung' as a verbal noun from 'snofl' meaning ‘mucus’, though it has only been recorded as a verbal noun. The word nowadays doesn't relate to noses, at least not directly, but the related word 'snuffle' certainly does. Having so many of these other related words helps to influence the formation of more, as was the case with 'snuffle' which was first found in the 16th century but is also related to 'snuff', as in tobacco found about a century later. Not off of the 'sn-' words that relate to noses can be attributed to PIE however, as...

This is the 900th Word Facts, if you were keeping a record; thank you for all the likes, comments, and shares. The subject today, 're-', has a few different uses explored on this blog, including its function to express intensive force which you may remember from, ' remember ', and to refer back to something such as with 'refer' coming from Latin meaning 'bring back'. With the word 'record', before technological means to document things, could mean "repeat to commit to memory". The word has a Latinate verbal prefix , but now the word when accented differently can be a noun , this sense came about later. By that time, the word already connoted written documents and laws, but originally what has now become a 'record' was oral, and meant in the English translation of Latin, in essence, "back to the heart" ('re- cord'), not terribly dissimilar to the expression, "remember something by heart", as was the or...

In many countries people write numbers using Arabic numerals, though these are poorly named as they come from India, and in the Middle East today very few of their numerals look the same; e.g. 2, 3, and 4 appear as ٢,٣, and ٤ respectively. There are many more systems of writing numbers out there, but in the West there tend to only be two used commonly, including the Arabic numerals of course, and Roman numerals. The latter use letters—I, V, X, L, C, D, and M—to express numbers, similar to many other systems. The Greek numerals, though less common than their Roman counterpart today, also use alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Some on the Roman system was somewhat arbitrary, such as V and L for fifty when the Latin word for both starts with a Q, but Greek numerals represented 1-10 with the first ten letters  of their alphabet, and 20-90 (going up by tens) is represented by the 11th through 18th letter, and hundreds are represented by the 19th through 27th letter (including...

Combining forms  are a good way to indicate relation between two areas. This appears in terms of conflicts, such that the Austro-Sardinian War, but also to denote regions, such as the Austro-asiatic language-family. The problem with this is that the aforementioned war, also called the the Franco-Austrian War took place between the Austrian Empire and the French and Sardinians, whereas Austro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, and does not relate to Austria at all. In this case, the name 'Austria' and the name 'Australia' both come from the Latin ' australis ' meaning 'south'. The Austro-Asiatic language family also does not relate to Australia, but they are found in the south of Asia.

People should endeavor to be frank with each other, even if they aren't named Franklin. Interestingly, the name and the adjective share the same root, though this is not to say that people named Franklin have been associated with honesty, in the same way that 'dick' denoting a penis derived from the frequency of people named Dick . While today Franklin might not mean anything more than the name, in the days of Feudal societies the term referred to a landowner who was free but wasn't noble, ultimately coming from 'francus' meaning ‘free’. This is the same origin as 'frank', but it is was used far before these land-owners; the Germanic tribe, the Franks were the only group to have full freedom in Frankish Gaul. The name for this tribe is from the Old English 'franca' meaning ‘javelin’, similar to the root for ' Saxon ' but was also reinforced by the Latin 'francus'. As mentioned in the post yesterday , modern day France composed the...